VMware – Security vulnerability VMSA-2015-0007

VMware announced over the weekend that some major security vulnerabilities have been identified in vCenter and ESXi 5.0, 5.1 and 5.5 as well as version 6.0. 6.0 Update 1 is not affected. Only the JMX RMI Remote code execution is an issue in vSphere 6.0. 3 vulnerabilities have been identified and the affect different versions in total.

ESXi OpenSLP Remote Code Execution

Allows unauthenticated users to execute code remotely on ESXi host

vCenter Server JMX RMI Remote Code Execution

An unauthenticated remote attacker that is able to connect to the service to execute arbitrary code on the vCenter server

vCenter Server vpxd denial-of-service vulnerability

Can allow a remote user to create a denial of service on the vpxd service through unsanitized heartbeat messages

The announcement was broken on both the VMware and TheRegister sites and I’d recommend viewing more information on both of those sites. TheRegister also gives some great background on how the issues were originally identified. The full advisory details including links to the CVE references can be viewed on the VMware Security Advisories site for VMSA-2015-0007.

If you are running vSphere 5.0 the recommendation is to upgrade to v5.0 Update 3e. For vSphere 5.1 upgrade to v5.1 Update 3. For vSphere 6 the recommendation is to patch with Update 1. vSphere 5.5 however has some issues. In order to fix the denial-of-service or the OpenSLP issues it’s advised to upgrade to vSphere 5.5 Update 2. However, to resolve the JMX RMI issue VMware have confirmed that vSphere 5.5 Update 3 which was released in early September as being the fix. But, a new bug has been identified with Update Patch 3 regarding snapshots. If a snapshot is deleted in vCenter it causes the VM to crash. Considering that the majority of snapshot related backup solutions utilise VMware snapshots it means that all VMs would reboot each night. Considering uptime is always a business and IT priority then it’s really not a feasible solution.

My advice would be to at least upgrade to vSphere 5.5 Update 2 if you can. Upgrade to vSphere 6.0 Update 1 if possible but that may require considerable research and interoperability checks and may not be on your roadmap just yet. Do not install ESXi 5.5 Patch 3 if your backup software depends on VMware snapshots.